John Stoehr: Customer Service Politics and the ’24 Presidential Election

Sea Change Radio

No matter what your current stance may be on the upcoming presidential election, the past few weeks of debate debacles and failed assassination attempts have definitely demonstrated that unforeseen events can happen. We still have several months between now and November, during which time the plot may continue to twist and turn. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with John Stoehr of The Editorial Board to get his insights into the calls for Democrats to replace President Biden on the ticket. In this free-flowing conversation, we unpack the problem with what Stoehr describes as a “customer service approach” to politics, learn why he believes third parties are a scam, and question polling data that have so many undecided voters in an election between two well-known quantities.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

John Stoehr (JS) | 00:23 – I don’t know what to say to people who are like, I need to be enthusiastic. That, that, again is the customer service attitude toward politics. It’s like, thrill me, get me excited, then I’ll make a decision. It’s like, “no.”

Narrator | 00:35 – No matter what your current stance may be on the upcoming presidential election, the past few weeks of debate debacle and failed assassination attempts have definitely demonstrated that unforeseen events can happen. We still have several months between now and November, during which time the plot may continue to twist and turn. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with John Stoehr of The Editorial Board to get his insights into the calls for Democrats to replace President Biden on the ticket. In this free-flowing conversation, we unpack the problem with what Stoehr describes as a customer service approach to politics, learn why he believes third parties are a scam and question polling data that have so many undecided voters in an election between two well-known quantities.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:39 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Stoehr. He is the founder and editor of The Editorial Board. John, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

John Stoehr (JS) | 01:47 – Thanks for having me back, Alex.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:49 – Really good to speak to you. I’ve been kind of putting this discussion off as long as possible so that it would hold up. Why don’t you first summarize what your thought process has been since the debate, the evolution of your thoughts, if you can.

JS | 02:05 – Well, I should guess I should start with how I experienced the, the debate pretty much like everybody else did. You know, I was, there was a lot of shock, like, whoa, where, who is this Biden? I haven’t seen this Biden before. You know, I don’t think that was a consequence of previously having been in denial. I pay attention to the President, um, pretty closely. And, he broke his foot. I knew that, and so that’s why he shuffles a bit. He’s 81. I chalked up a lot of his behavior to age and so on, and I didn’t have any sense of, of, of cognitive decline. And then, you know, I saw the debate and I start, I, myself was like, maybe I’m missing something for sure. But, you know, then as somebody who believes like, well, he does have the best shot of defeating Trump, and Trump is an existential threat to democracy, you know, the stakes are very high, and if anybody’s going to do it, it’s going to be him. So I, I watched that North Carolina rally very closely. I was looking for reasons to think, you know, was this just a one-off? Are his excuses true? You know, his excuses were, I was sick and, and, and so on. To me, the excuses seemed like pretty valid. I understand that a lot of that’s not enough for a lot of people. I think what’s going on right now is that the president’s priorities are to get his people in line as quickly as possible, because without his base, he’s got nothing. And he’s going to have to worry about undecided people as we get closer to the election. And because, because his own people are the, the primary focus right now, that’s why there’s so much attention on elected Democrats and what they’re saying. And the very beginning, I was very, I was skeptical of the so-called dam breaking that seemed to be more of a media trope than a reflection of reality. And in fact, you could still make the case that the dam has not broken, because there’s only a couple dozen, maybe congressional Democrats who have, who are now on the record as saying that Biden should drop out. Of course, that has to compete with, you know, all these other Democrats saying in private that the president is in trouble and so on. And then that’s not nothing, you know, what they say in private is not nothing, but it is also not the same thing as coming right out and saying that the president should drop out. As it stands right now, the president seems to have the advantage, as it were, that he, he still, the base is behind him, the base, despite all these stragglers. And so the state of the race of the nomination right now is that he will be the nominee, whether people like Adam Schiff, the congressman from California, believes he will win or not.

AW | 05:06 – One thing that I, I think we both agree on is that the whole fantasy sports element of people wanting, you know, Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or some other candidate is not realistic. And that if he’s stepping aside and Kamala Harris is going to be the nominee, it’s not going to be an open convention where they’re going to introduce America to a, a, a brand new candidate three months before the presidential election against a, an authoritarian maniac.

JS | 05:40 – . Yeah. You notice that a lot of these people who were immediately for him dropping out were, I would say that these are very comfortable people. These are people who, uh, where the stakes are not that high for them personally. Yes. I think their stakes are abstract. They have, they’re concerned about democracy and rights and decency and civil discourse, and they’re all, but they’re not like red meat stakes. You know, like, like, you know, if your, if your mother is an immigrant from ha from Ecuador, you, she’s going to be in trouble. Like, those are the stakes for you. Right? So the, so these people who are calling on him to drop out, they’re not only are their stakes for them abstract, they’re, their solutions are abstract.

AW | 06:34 – Yes. That’s very important is the solutions are so abstract.

JS | 06:38 – Their solutions are abstract, and they get, they can give the impression that their arguments are fully fleshed out when, when they’re not. You know, and fortunately you have somebody like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer coming forward and saying, stop naming me, , stop naming me as she did. I think it was last week as some kind of alternative, because I am not going to be that alternative. Right? And actually, the more the people who are named dropped, who come forward and say, stop doing that, the more focused and less abstract this conversation will become. So that if the, if it is the case that the president says he’s not going to continue, and I don’t think he’s going to say that, I think he’s going to say, I’m, I’m the guy. However, if he does, then the focus will be on where it should be, which is the obvious and plain successor who is the vice president Kamala Harris that is going, she will be the successor and she will be the successor for, for the obvious reasons. One of which is that if she’s passed over, uh, for somebody else that’s going to enrage so many democrats, such to such a degree that they may not even show up to vote, and that’s , why, why would you risk that? Uh, the other thing is that she has been vetted, she has been campaigning, she is prepared for, for this kind of alternative scenario. And then third is about money. She’s the only one who has the legal right to, to the camp, to the Biden campaign cash. And anybody else will have to start from zero. And not only do they have to introduce themselves to America, but they have to start fundraising from zero.

AW | 08:25 – And, and I’d add to that, that a voter is voting for an administration, not necessarily a person. And we keep forgetting that. And that’s been the biggest knock against Biden. It’s like, yeah, sure, he is been a great president, he’s done all these things, but he’s not a good messenger for it. They want a salesperson out there selling the accomplishments more effectively than the way Joe Biden is communicating that. And I admit, he’s not Barack Obama in his oratory, and he’s never been. But I, I’ve read an interesting analysis from a speech expert who’s a professor at a university, I forget his name, but he, he analyzed the debate performance and said that you go through these periods of stammering and stuttering, and it just like a concussion where you, you are a little more prone to headaches and, and concussion like symptoms for a month or two after a head trauma. You go through these periods of stuttering. And he, he saw, he recognized a lot of the same speech patterns in Biden that he had with himself grappling. And one of the things he said is that he believes that Biden was over-prepared by his staff to have all these zingers and things. And when you have memorized things that you’re trying to memorize, your, your brain can kind of get jumbled as a stutterer. This guy was saying, when he’s speaking in front of a class and he’s over-prepared, he ends up speaking less effectively, which is kind of counterintuitive to non-starters. He says, he’ll, you know, when he just has some rough notes and a rough idea and he’s mastered the material, that’s when he speaks most eloquently. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.

JS | 10:02 – I think that is true too. I, I, you know, my reaction to that commentary is that the reaction to the debate is myopic in that it only had eyes for Biden , the reaction never had said virtually nothing about Trump who was lying and lying and lying and lying. And he was lying so confidently and so, uh, aggressively that he came off as like somehow competent. I, I don’t know. I don’t know how, I don’t know why we do this in America. I think there are just some people who kind of, their moral orientation is toward the lowest common denominator, it seems to me, you know, where like, you know, let’s just forget about what they’re actually saying and just talk about how they’re saying it.

AW | 10:49 – That was the takeaway from the, the initial t TV debate of Nixon versus Kennedy. That’s what nobody ever gives John Kennedy credit for maybe being a, a better politician than Richard Nixon. It was like, oh, that was like, he was better looking than Richard Nixon. So that tells you that you need to be good looking, but we’ve seen plenty of people who don’t necessarily have great looks. Go on to political ascendancy.

JS | 11:12 – Exactly. I mean, and, and if our discourse is really about appearances rather than substance, it, of course, what here, here’s what happens, that the president doesn’t get credit for the things he does, right? If our, if our, our political discourse is, um, gonna privilege appearances over substance, then of course the president doesn’t get credit when his accomplishments are so substantial. You know, for instance, uh, the Times reported, I think it was last week or the week before that all of these, so-called left behind counties, that is, these are rural, usually typically rural places that used to have a manufacturing base, but have over the past 25 years, um, and have been, um, been withering away, right? And thanks to the president’s, uh, legislative accomplishments, meaning the American Recovery Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and so on and so forth, these counties have seen a huge comeback, right? Like, like people have never seen it happen, have haven’t seen this happen in 25 years, right? And these are in rural areas, you know, you know where, you know what kind of people live in rural areas, they typically are white people, right? But a lot of these, a lot of these people are not giving the resident credit for improving their lives. Instead, what they end up doing is believing lies, lies about the president. And of course, the mainstream media, especially the New York Times, has made a fetish of Biden’s age. And so, so this, this man who has saved the country, and you could, I mean, that’s, that’s an argument you could make saved us from the pandemic, saved us from a recessions and so on and so forth. He can’t get the credit he deserves. He can’t, he can’t say to, to, instead of saying to the American people, vote for me again, because here’s what I’ve done. Now he’s in the position of saying, please vote for me again, even though I’m old. That’s a crazy place to be.

AW | 13:09 – Especially when he’s just three years older than a guy who was not a good president. And is the, the list is endless on all of his shortcomings, but the media has kind of just dismissed that. And they’re like, yeah, yeah, of course he’s crazy, but Biden’s old.

JS | 13:22 – , right? And, and if the, if that’s the basis of the conversation, then we’re having a crazy conversation, then reasonable people sound crazy. How can reasonable people ? You know, how can we have a democratic deliberation based on facts and reason when being reasonable and being factual don’t matter. I don’t know. I don’t know how to do it. I dunno if anybody does.

(Music Break) | 13:53

AW | 14:58 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to John Stoehr, he’s the editor and founder of The Editorial Board. So John, you’re talking about how can a right-minded individual look at these two candidates and decide that there’s something to be decided here? Because Joe Biden is old. Just to answer the question if I can, I think it’s because people are so afraid. I think you and I are just as afraid as a copy editor at the New York Times. There are many, many people who are extremely scared of what a, a second Trump administration could mean for this country and for the world. And so how do you deal with that fear? Some people take that fear and, and turn it into knocking on doors in action. Other people write lots of well thought out editorials on The, Editorial, Board. Other people have a radio show, but the Fear-based lens adjusts accordingly. So we all want the same thing. Generally, I think there is going to be a reluctant coalescing behind Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or whoever, because the alternative is so damn scary.

JS | 16:13 – Lemme talk about a specific kind of fear. There’s the fear of, you know, authoritarianism and loss of rights and democracy and so on. But there’s a kind of fear about, uh, uncertainty that is rooted in basically like, I’m afraid of what other people think. You, you hear it all the time, like, oh, I’m going to vote for Biden, but I’m afraid the undecided voter won’t vote, right?

AW | 16:32 – Right. Like, I’m afraid people aren’t going to get out because he didn’t do well in that debate. They’re not going to go rally for him. So that’s (apparently) why he has to go.

JS | 16:41 – Well, I think one of the things that anybody can do, any reasonable person can do is just stop accepting nonsense as if it’s worthy of your respect.

AW | 16:51 – Give me an example of this nonsense that you’re talking about.

JS | 16:53 – Well, the undecided voter is somebody who actually doesn’t pay attention, right? The undecided voter is somebody who doesn’t pay attention and doesn’t want to pay attention, because if they believe that paying attention is some somehow, uh, sies them morally, you know, and I mean this literally, when I say that people who don’t pay attention often treat that as if it’s a virtue, as if they’re above politics, right? And so that makes them very susceptible to things like the New York Times crusading about, about the president age. It makes them very susceptible to the idea of like, oh, these are two choices that I, I don’t really like. Right? It makes them, makes them more susceptible to treating politics as if it’s not politics. But instead more like customer service, as if you are the customer and you’re paying money for something and you are entitled to get exactly what you want for it, right?

AW | 17:49 – Right. Verizon is giving me 10% less than at and t so I’m going with Verizon this year. But they’re not thinking beyond their own phone bill.

JS | 17:59 – That’s exactly right. And, and so these whole, these undecided voters, you know, one way of not being afraid of these undecided voters is to say to them, knock it off. Stop it. I don’t need to hear all of that. You need to grow up. You need to step up and say, these are two very different things. This is an apple, and this is an orange, and you need to decide, right? This apple is not going to be like this orange, and this orange is not going to be like this apple. And by the way, I don’t need to explain the difference between apples and oranges. You’re a grown man. You’re a grown woman. You know the difference. .

AW | 18:32 – Let’s turn to the polling data that we’ve been seeing and, and try to read into it. And I think one of the reasons why it’s hard to really draw any major conclusions in mid-July about scary polling is that one team has a ground game and the other doesn’t. And that’s when you have those conversations, which we’ve shown is the single most effective way of persuading voters one way or another. It’s not an ad, it’s not a good debate to performance. It’s somebody coming to your door having a conversation with you looking into the, your eyes and being an effective messenger for what policies matter to you.

JS | 19:11 – Yeah. Or like another grown reasonable person coming to you fa looking you in the face and saying, look, I need you to step up. You really can do this. You know, we can all do this together. Forget about all the, the, you know, the whole idea of that you hate both, both candidates, these are the candidates, right? Yes. Maybe two years ago, we could have, we could have, would’ve, should have had different kinds of choices that’s passed. We need to make a dec decision right now. I think it’s really important not to respect the customer service attitude toward politics. I think it’s, we tend to respect that because we’re all in a capitalist society, right? We tend to, we’re, it’s so prevalent as to be invisible. You know, once you stop respecting the nonsense, we still may lose. Nobody knows the future. But I think a lot of the fear that people have is this taking on as their own, all the nonsense some other people have in their minds, their delusions, their sense of righteousness or what, I don’t know what really animates people who can’t, who are looking at an apple and an orange and can’t decide. I really don’t. But I do know they can’t decide.

AW | 20:25 – These are very well known quantities. So I, the amount of undecideds in this election, I find hard to agree with the data that I’ve seen on it.

JS | 20:35 – Yeah. I, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know. I think, you know, probably the Biden campaign should worry about, you know, people who are just not going to vote, you know? Um, and, but it’s the same. I would have the same argument to the those people. If they, if they, if they’re, if somebody can vote and they’re choosing, they’re saying, well, maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I don’t, I have no idea what to tell that person. Uh, you know, I guess my point in all of this, Alex, is, is that there are, you know, we, we can adopt the kind of media’s framing of what the, of, of how to communicate. And we can talk about messaging and so on, but we can, you can set that aside and just expect grown men and women to be grown men and women, and to make a decision. You see, you know, and it’s like, and to make a decision that they know is probably the, the right decision, you know? Now I’m not talking about Trumpists. Those people are set, they’re not reachable.

AW | 21:34 – But they’re also about 33 to 37% of the electorate at best.

JS | 21:39 – Yeah. And I, I don’t think anybody should waste any time trying to convince somebody whose mind is, has been made up for a very long time. I’m talking about people, people who already voted in 2020. They, and they’re, they should come to the same conclusion. , to sum up this point, Alex, I think that a lot of Democrats and liberals spend a lot of time talking about what Biden and what the Democrats should be doing and how they should be talking and so on. We don’t put enough expectation on American citizens themselves. And I think we don’t do that because we’re afraid of this, this idea that we’re condescending to them or, or that we’re disrespecting people. And that’s certainly what, what the Republicans, that’s how they would characterize it. You know, that, you know, putting expectations on a democratic citizenry is somehow some form of elitism. And that’s, that itself is nonsense. You should expect people who live in a d in a democracy to vote. You should expect that. That’s a good thing.

AW | 22:38 – One of the real dangers of the post debate arguments for Biden stepping down has been that the younger generation has been alienated from the process in a, in a, a way that we haven’t really seen since the Vietnam era. I, I’ve spoken to, this is anecdotal, of course, but they were skeptical of, they were like, but you know, Joe Biden’s old, so what about RFK Junior? Or what, not that they were going to vote for him, but they wanted to know, like, there must be some alternative, right? Because both of these guys stink, and these are educated kids whose parents have graduate degrees, and they’re probably going to vote for Joe Biden in the end. But they were not excited. You know, their, their enthusiasm wasn’t what it should be when there’s so much at stake. And that’s scary.

JS | 23:27 – And I know, but that, but if we’re talking about their enthusiasm, I just, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say to people who are like, I need to be enthusiastic. That, that again is the customer service attitude toward politics. It’s like, thrill me, get me excited, then I’ll make a decision. It’s like, “no.”

AW | 23:44 – They think of it as a person and not an administration. And I think that’s a, a key thing that people overlook.

JS | 23:52 – I don’t blame young people for believing this, that they’re only, they’re learning what, what we, their seniors are teaching them. And what we are teaching them is that politics is only about voting. You know, like that your power as a citizen is, is reduced completely down to this one time every four years voting for the president. And that is nonsense. Some, we are teaching them the wrong lesson. Democratic politics never ends. It’s an ongoing process. It happens every time you send a, a post to Instagram about your opinion about something. It’s when you make arguments about this or that. Cause when you raise money for people, when it’s own, it’s ongoing. It goes on all the time. That is people’s power. And I think people get really afraid, or they, they feel like they have no choices. When we, when we reduce democratic politics, the awesomeness of democratic politics down to this single act every four years, that’s why they’re not happy. I would tell every young person to reject that idea that their only power is at just during, during voting. Just throw that away completely. And guess what? Instantly you’re going to be more empowered. You’re going to realize you have an immense power, especially when you’re working in concert with, with like-minded people in doing, trying to make life better. That is your power. That’s politics. Right? And by, okay, but let me shift here and say about third parties. They’re a scam. They have been a scam. They’re always going to be a scam given the way this, the, the, um, politics is structured in this country. And it wasn’t because yes, the parties have a lot to do with maintaining the status quo. That’s, there’s no question about that. The thing, the reason why we have only two options is because of the way things were structured in the very beginning. We do not have a proportional system of government. We have a winner take all system of, of government so that if you, Alex, win 51% and I win 49%, you win a hundred percent. Right? That’s the way it works. And because there’s only that, there’s no room for a third party. The third party cannot win. Cannot win, right? We know this because they never win. .

AW | 26:15 – Getting back to Joe Biden dropping out, it becomes a self perpetuating cycle where I, I wouldn’t be shocked if he steps down before the convention at this point. It’s not a fade to complete that. He’s going to be the candidate.

JS | 26:29 – No, I agree. At this point, it may not be that surprising. That’s true. But I think there’s still, it’s still a customer service attitude toward politics. And in that, there’s this discomfort with uncertainty. The debate rattled something in people who are comfortable, that this is this, this is my point earlier, like the people who called for him to step down right away. And even over time, these are comfortable people, right? The stakes for them are fairly abstract. All of a sudden they felt uncomfortable. They felt uncertain, right? And because, and because they felt this kind of uncertainty, suddenly everything’s gotta change, right? . And it’s like, well, maybe, but, you know, but who are you? Well, it turns out these are very elite, influential people who can’t actually tolerate uncertainty that well. Whereas people who have uncertainty in their very daily lives, guess who they support Biden. They think Biden can win. They’re, they’re hitching their wagons to him. People who are really on the margins and who are really gonna vote and really have something at stake, they’re waiting for Biden. So anybody who’s on the fence, I would, I would say look to the people who are truly vulnerable in what they are saying. ’cause they are going to be the first people to suffer whatever consequences happen if Trump wins.

AW | 27:52 – Well, I appreciate your insights as always, John. And I hope we can do this again, post-convention, John Stoehr of The Editorial Board, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

JS | 28:01 – Thanks, Alex.

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Lettuce and Josh Rouse. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.